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The Playbook On Career and Family: Six CEOs Independently Reached the Same Verdict #049 · CEOs and ABCs

• 0:00
  Jennifer Kattula: So then you can build the systems that allow you to be super present at home and grow your career at the same time. Like, you know, that balanced equation that a lot of people talk about. I'm not sure if I'm totally bought into balance. It's more design. Because when I became a mom, I think that is when my career took a different turn. Like, it accelerated in a way. And I was so not expecting it, Kevin. Like, I really wasn't. I thought, okay, I'm gonna become a mom, and I'm gonna plateau at whatever level I was, and I'm gonna do the 9 to 5 and spend all my extra time with my family and be really present. And I think what I found is that I developed some sort of new superpower where I got super focused on what I wanted to crush. Like, I at work. Like, not trying to be everything to everyone, trying to crush a few things and do.
• 1:02
  Kevin Rice: Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. That's Jen Katula, CMO of Microsoft Advertising. And what she just said that work life balance isn't really the goal. That's what this whole episode is about. I've asked almost every guest on this show some version of the same question. How do you balance your career and your family? And somewhere around guest 15 or 20, I noticed something. Almost nobody actually answers it. They always push back on the question. So today, instead of one conversation, you're getting seven. First, the people telling me why work life balance doesn't really exist, then what they think we should be chasing instead. Here's what I believe now after all these conversations. Work life balance is the wrong goal entirely. What actually works is three things. Intentionality, presence, and integration. So let's get into it.
• 1:50
  Deena DePhillips: Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting, wins and fails, and everything in between. I'm your host, Kevin Rice. Here's Today's episode.
• 2:02
  Kevin Rice: Dina DeFillips is the CTO of Red Robin. She stepped into the role just five weeks after having her daughter. And if anyone's earned the right to have an opinion on this term, it's her.
• 2:12
  Kyle Lacy: The hardest transition was I was that corporate athlete. I was working 80 hours a week, seven days a week, sleeping under my desk. And that's not an exaggeration, but I did that for more than a decade, and it served me very well. But then that way of working didn't serve me when I became a parent, so. So I had to. I had to figure that out. And it took me probably a good year of finally getting a groove of being a new mom and managing an executive career. So I also became more relatable to them because I became a parent myself. I hate the terminology work life balance. I don't think it exists.
• 2:50
  Kevin Rice: Listen to how she gets there. She doesn't start by disliking the term. She starts by telling you what a decade of 80 hour weeks and sleeping under her desk Ashley looked like. And in her words, it served her right up until she became a parent and it stopped working altogether. The distaste for the word work life balance comes after that. She's not just rejecting a concept, she's rejecting a word that let her avoid looking at what 10 years of that pace had actually cost her. And I can certainly relate to that. I didn't question my own hours either until I started noticing the price of the consequences. Dena named what the grind cost her, whereas Kyle Lacy isn't fighting the term at all. He just tells you flat out he doesn't have it. Kyle Lacy has been a CMO multiple times over at Lesnly Seismic and now Docebo. He's also about as allergic to corporate spin as anybody I've ever talked to.
• 3:44
  Jennifer Prince: The first decade of my career, 90% of every waking moment was spent on more egotistical thinking, like how do I further my brand? How do I further what I'm doing? Then when you have your first kid and your family grows, you start realizing that you're not the center of the world and you start adjusting accordingly. But I'm not going to lie. I am still egotistical. I still work too much. But I love what I do. And I'm very lucky that my family has figured out how to balance that with me appropriately. But I think it's important for everybody to note that it's okay to feel that way. It's okay to wake up in the middle of the night like I did last night, thinking about something at work and get up and start working on it. Because if that's what you enjoy doing, it's okay. I don't know how you feel about work life balance, but I don't have it at all.
• 4:33
  Kevin Rice: What I appreciate about Kyle is he's not apologizing for caring deeply about his work. And there's something important to that that I actually want my own kids to see too. We talk a lot about being present for our children, and that matters, obviously. But I also want my kids to know what it looks like to work hard for something to care about your craft, to chase something that matters to you, even when it costs you sleep or weekend or time with friends, a little bit of your ego. Because someday they're going to have to go into the world and build a life of their own. And what we're modeling for them right now is what that actually takes. Anything worth having usually takes some work. So Dena rejected the term pretty much outright. Kyle's given up on it entirely. Now. Jen Prince took a different path. She didn't throw the word out, she just rephrased what it meant. Jen Prince has led commercial teams at Twitter, Google, YouTube, and now she's the chief commercial officer of the LA Rams. She's a mother of three children, including twins, and here are her thoughts on the topic.
• 5:33
  Anthony Valletta: My husband, my partner in crime, has made a lot of it possible for when I'm on the road or when I'm working midweek later in the evening. I would say that having that rock and that sounding board has truly made it all possible. But I also believe that just finding the rhythm of work, life, balance, people all the time. Ask me whether it was when I became a mom almost 17 years ago to now. How do you do it all? You know, a notable moment was leaving on a business trip early morning. My oldest daughter, who was a three at the time, looking through her window shades, crying, watching her mom go into a car to get driven to the airport. And I remember that moment of if I am going to continue having my career while being a mom, I needed to know that in my job. I felt my impact.
• 6:26
  Kevin Rice: Notice she doesn't call balance fake. She she calls it rhythm. That's a small swap that I think makes a big difference. Rhythm implies movement. Some weeks you lean one way and other weeks you lean the other. In that moment of her daughter watching her through the blinds, that's the moment that changed everything for her. So four executives, four different companies, and four completely different lives, and not one of them believes in balance the way that it's usually sold to us. Which raises the obvious question, if not balance, then what?
• 6:57
  Deena DePhillips: Hi, Kevin here. If you're enjoying this conversation and you know someone else who's working to grow in their career while staying present at home, I'd really love it if you could share this episode with them. It's one of the best ways you can help us and help more leaders build their careers in a way that they're proud of without missing the moments that matter most.
• 7:15
  Kevin Rice: When I went back through every conversation we'd had on this show, the answers that actually held up weren't about balance. They clustered around three things. Intentionality, presence, and integration. Anthony Valletta is the CEO of Bar Taco. He runs his calendar with equal weight, integrating his work and his family life.
• 7:34
  Linda Bethea: My calendars are synced, so all of my family stuff is on my work calendar. My calendar looks like reading Rainbow. Like everything's color coded. Red means don't, don't ever touch and leave that there. And that's high priority. And yellow's like, yeah, you probably should move that one. And then green is like, you can do everyone with these. It's fine. I rework my calendar every three months. Like I delete my entire calendar every three months and repopulate it and like really reassess everything that's from what my kids are doing to what I'm doing. But I really tried to work hard on being like omnipresent and just saying, listen, if I'm, if I'm going to choose to either be at work or at home or wherever I am, like, be in that moment and don't try to be in two places at once. And that's something I have to constantly remind myself of.
• 8:15
  Kevin Rice: What I love about this is he's applied the same rigor to protecting his time with his family that most executives only apply to their clients. That's intentionality. Not just finding time, but deciding in advance what's non negotiable. Intentionality is about deciding what matters before the week starts. Presence is about what happens when you're actually in the room. And nobody put it more simply than Kyle Lacy did the second time I asked him about it. So we're back to Kyle Lacy, where I asked him what actually helps him stay present for his family.
• 8:45
  Jennifer Prince: What I actually do is make sure I try as much as possible not to work past 6pm that's not reality, really. And I'm still putting it 10 to 12 hour days. And then I, as much as I possibly can. There's no working on the weekends. Early morning is, is a gift for me because I get up early and I will work out and work and then the kids will get up and then I'll be present because I've gotten everything out before 7am Put away your phone.
• 9:11
  Kevin Rice: I actually laughed out loud when you landed on that last line because it's so true. Our phones are designed to keep us addicted. I literally have to put my phone on the shelf every night when I'm with my kids to avoid the temptation. I used to read my kids bedtime stories at night while Mentally rehearsing a sales pitch or a leadership meeting. And I thought it was brilliant. I called it multitasking. It wasn't. It was being in two places, yet present in neither. Presence isn't complicated. It's just hard because it means giving something up in the moment instead of trying to do everything all at once. Intentionality is planning it and presence is showing up for it. And that third piece, intentionality, is what happens when you stop treating work and family like two separate rooms that you have to keep the doors closed, close between. Linda bethea is the CMO of Danone, and she's a single mom to a 16 year old daughter, Finley. She used a word that I haven't really heard from many other people on the show, but once she did, it was like a light bulb went off.
• 10:07
  Kevin Rice: I'm a big believer in work life integration. I got divorced during kind of the, you know, prime of my career. And it was a time when all of a sudden I was managing custody schedules and work travel and trying to figure it all out. And I quickly realized that I had no role models at work to show me how that was. That was a pivotal moment for me where I was like, I'm going to be the type of leader and role model that I wish I had. That integration between work and life made me not only a better mom, but it also made me a better marketer and a better leader. I made it a practice. When I walked in the door, I would put my phone in a box and I would make sure that while I was making dinner, while I was giving her her bath, while we were reading bedtime stories, I wasn't tempted by that distraction.
• 10:52
  Kevin Rice: Linda didn't just talk about integration. She has actually lived it. She's brought her daughter on work trips. She's brought her daughter on stage at a marketing conference. Eventually, they even recently started a podcast together. What struck me is her claim that this actually made her better at both things. It wasn't a compromise between them. That's very different from balance. Balance says these two parts of your life are competing for the same resource. Integration says they can actually feed each other. So here's the thread I see when I put all these conversations together side by side. Maybe work life balance isn't about creating equal time between your career and your family. Maybe it's about making sure that neither one of them actually gets abandoned. Life is fluid. There are seasons when work demands more of you and seasons when your family does. The percentages are going to move. What matters is that both stay important enough to actually influence the choices you make. And the people who seem to make this work keep coming back to the same three things intentionality, presence, and integration. Intentionality is about deciding what matters before everything else starts competing for your time. Presence is about being fully wherever you are once that choice is made. And integration is recognizing that work and family don't have to compete. That your kids can see you work hard, care deeply, and chase something meaningful, while also knowing that they matter enough for you to show up for both. Maybe there's one more ingredient underneath all of that, and that's perseverance. Because none of this works perfectly, you're going to get it wrong. You'll over commit. You're going to miss things. You'll have seasons where everything feels completely off. But the goal isn't perfection, it's continuing to recalibrate. Maybe that's what balance really looks like. Not 50 50, but intentionality over time. Staying committed to both your ambition and the people you love, and refusing to let success in one require abandoning the other. I'm Kevin Rice and thanks for watching. If any of these conversations hit home for you, I'd encourage you to watch the full episodes. There's so much more that we didn't have time to get to today. Thank you so much for watching.
• 12:58
  Deena DePhillips: If you've enjoyed this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We have many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow and stay tuned.